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Vasubandhu on Intentional Action: From Mind-Body to Mind-Only (Allison Aitken, Columbia)
Friday May 8, 2026, 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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The Global Philosophy Research Interest Group is pleased to welcome as its guest speaker Allison Aitken, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. Dr. Aitken’s research centers on non-standard theories of relations and dependence structures in the history of metaphysics, with a particular focus on Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist philosophical traditions. She also has interests in Classical Indian Philosophy more broadly as well as Early Modern European Philosophy. She is currently completing a book manuscript (under contract with Oxford University Press) on the Madhyamaka Buddhist ontological dependence structure understood as a kind of metaphysical indefinitism.
Talk Title
“Vasubandhu on Intentional Action: From Mind-Body to Mind-Only”
Talk Abstract
What, metaphysically speaking, qualifies an action as intentional? In this talk, I examine Vasubandhu’s response to this question and show how his account of the nature and causal mechanics of intentional action exposes a tension between (i) a mereological nihilistic form of exdurantism and (ii) moral realism—namely, the difficulty of reconciling anti-realism about spatiotemporal composites with realism about moral facts concerning intentional actions and their consequences. Vasubandhu’s solution is to eliminatively reduce intentional bodily action to mental action, specifically the momentary mental act of intending a bodily movement. I identify some notable payoffs of this action theory, including its straightforward handling of cases involving causal deviance and negative actions. Yet even if all morally significant action is, strictly speaking, mental action, explanatory difficulties remain concerning mental causation when it comes to the question of how precisely the mind causes the body to move and precipitate change in the world. I show how Vasubandhu ultimately leverages this puzzle to argue for metaphysical idealism. Eliminating matter sidesteps worries about mind→body causal interaction, but raises new questions about mind→mind interaction: how do our intentional actions affect other minds in the absence of a shared material world? I conclude with an analysis of Vasubandhu’s account of this process, which commits him to a surprisingly opaque picture of the mind for an idealist, characterized by qualified symmetrical access to mental states together with a form of externalism about mental content.
Watch the talk on Zoom
One of six departmental Research Interest Groups, the Global Philosophy Research Interest Group explores the benefits of drawing on diverse traditions of thought in approaching philosophical questions.
